Then in 1879 at about 7-15 pm on a stormy night in December the rail
bridge spanning the Firth of Tay, collapsed, plunging a train and its 75
passengers into the dark waters beneath. There were no survivors.

As the news sent shock waves through the Victorian engineering
profession.
The disaster came as a hammer blow to a well respected Nunthorpe
business man

William Innes Hopkins was a flamboyant figure who enjoyed the good
life. He was a member of the Tees Conservancy Commission and a
Middlesbrough Town Councillor and had been elected mayor for two years
running. He had married well, to his second wife Miss Everald Hustler of
Acklam Hall at a ceremony attended by the families of all the local
gentry.

The Hustlers and their ancestors had occupied Acklam Hall for close
on three hundred years and it is thought that King Charles 1 was
entertained beneath its superb plasterwork ceilings.

Understandably Hopkins needed to establish similar standards for his
bride and spared no expense in building the impressive Grey Towers hall
at Nunthorpe with its extensive gardens and lake.

Hopkins had arrived on Teesside in 1850 to manage a fuel plant and
three years later had met a Mr Snowdon. Together they formed the
Teesside Ironworks which eventually merged to form Hopkins Gilkes &
Co. a construction company specialising in bridge buildingas as well as
the building of locomotives.

The company suffered a serious blow when a boiler supplying steam to
operate the rolling mills exploded. The blast hurled a number of the men
into the River Tees and 16 workers were seriously injured by the
scalding steam and flying debris. Middlesbrough at that time had a
population of 15,000 yet the nearest hospital was at Newcastle and many
of the men died on the journey to Tyneside.

Winning the contract to construct the Tay Bridge came as a great
relief to the company which was running into financial problems

The Tay Bridge carried a single railway line from London and
Edinburgh to Dundee and Aberdeen and crossed the Tay estuary from Wormit
in Fife to the City of Dundee. At the time it was the longest bridge in
the world.
On the night of the disaster, a gale force wind was blowing down the
estuary at right angles to the bridge which had been opened only nine
months previously and passed as safe by the Board of Trade inspectors.

It had been created by Thomas Bouch who received a knighthood for his
design and who was working on the design of the Forth Bridge. But he had
failed to make adequate allowance for the wind loading. He had used a
wind pressure of only 10 pounds per square foot and yet on his Forth
Bridge design, he had increased this calculation to 30 lbs/sq.ft

The Tay bridge was nearly two miles long and consisted of 85 spans
including 13 navigation spans. These “high girders” as they were
known were 27 ft high with an 88 ft clearance above the high water mark
and it was these spans that collapsed under the strength of the wind.

At a subsequent Court of Inquiry, Sir Thomas Bouch was made to
shoulder the blame together with Hopkins Gilkes & Co who were
accused of grave irregularities at its Wormit foundry on the south of
the Tay.

The inquiry concluded ..”had competent persons been appointed to
superintend the work there, instead of it being left almost wholly in
the hands of a foreman moulder, there can be little doubt that the
columns would not have been sent out to the bridge with serious defects.
They would also have taken care to see that the bolt holes in the lugs
and flanges of the 18 inch columns were cast truly cylindrical, or if
that could not have been done, thay would have drawn the attention of
the engineer. But that does not appear to have been done. The great
object seems to have been to get through the work with little delay as
possible without seeing whether it was properly and carefully executed
or not “…

It was an indictment that ruined the company. Hopkins as general
manager was finished, and in 1880 he became bankrupt, his public life
was in ruins. He tried to sell Grey Towers for £30,000 but failed to
find a buyer. Finally he and his wife and his small son moved to Norton
near Malton North Yorkshire and the house was left empty.

By a twist of fate his son Mostyn Hustler Hopkins inherited Acklam
Hall and sold it to Middlesbrough Borough Council who in turn converted
it into a grammar school which opened its doors to pupils in 1935.